I carried a small timelapse camera that looks like a shampoo bottle around for a little more than 18 months. Each day became a ~3minute timelapse movie. About 300x normal speed. Five minutes of life becomes about 1 second of movie.
Each month is about 90 minutes of footage. I put together six months into a single film that has six panels laid out like this.
[ JUL AUG SEP
OCT NOV DEC ]
Here’s a sample from the first six month movie:

So I have now made 3 compilation movies. Each movie is about 90 minutes long and covers six months of my timelapse movies. From Mid 2009 to Jan 2011. To me, they are something like fishbowl or fireplace movies. A texture or pattern of life. Is there a narrative?

And here is timelapse version of the third episode compressed into 3 1/2 minutes.

All the individual movies and the compilation movies are public domain so you are free to reuse as you please.

But maybe you want a copy of the full lengths on DVD? I am happy to put them together for you with some custom art and mail it to you.

What did i take away from all these movies? I think mostly it made me think about plants and slowness. After all this time filming myself I figured it was time to spend some time filming something shared like our food supply so I am working with a couple small Boston area (Concord) farms to create a public domain movie about the 6 month growing season. Roughly late April to late September. $99 and you will get some timelapse movies, some handdrawn art and the bonus of helping fund a public domain movie about food.http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1464315496/timelapse-farm-a-source-code-for-food

all of these pieces of media i consume, they all have a story associated. a narrative. they contain information about how a series of events leads to a particular conclusion. depending on what type of stories i consume, then my mind is likely to interpret my own options and choices in the world differently.

for food, i can understand that i am what i eat. imw uti eat. imwutieet. when choosing what food to consume i might be guided by the food pyramid (or 40-30-30, local food, etc). basic carbohydrates at the bottom, fruit and veggies just above, meat and dairy after that and finally fats and oils. if i eat too much of the stuff at the top i will become unbalanced, unstable. a lopsided pyramid.

so what about the media i consume? how would i categorize or break down the different common narratives? what is the carbs? what is protein, fiber, fat? my first guess would be that hero narratives are fatty and i(and the rest of the west) have consumed a few too many of these. what should be the basic narrative, the bottom of the pyramid? something like “hard work pays off” or “clear goals and small steps”? or “just be”?

some of what i eat passes through me. some becomes fuel, some becomes muscle, bone, etc. what do the stories become? and how do i feel about my current diet?

Banks keep records of every transaction.
Courtrooms keep records of every case.
Sports games are all recorded and statistics published.
News live from the street.
Libraries, academic lectures, music bootlegs and live recordings, etc.
The carvings on an old desk keep some record of those who worked in that spot.

So now we also keep records through mobile phone transactions, credit cards, twitter, youtube, version control systems, github, server log files, browser histories, and so much more. Are most of our recent records written from private spaces or private devices?

Courtrooms, sports games, on location news, and rock concerts are notable for their group witness to recording. We can trust media more if we have been part of the audience in a similar situation before?
And how about in our day to day lives, do we trust someone from far away with a mobile phone more than someone close without one?
It’s especially interesting in a dense city how many people you walk by each day and don’t talk to. Do you generally need some sort of third party technical reference to trust them? In a village you know (and trust?) your neighbors but in a city, you need a third party institution to regulate trust?

Is there a small service enterprise like a restaurant, barber shop, or bodega, but instead of serving you food or giving you a haircut, it delivers/collects info from you? And this would build trust and collaboration from bottom up as opposed to coming from the top down like current government or corporate trust systems? By putting collected info into the public domain, you are creating a lake instead of a warehouse full of inventory? And this would be a symmetric shared resource, more liquid than exoskeletal?

How would public record keeping change the dynamic between large product driven companies and small service businesses? Could a public history file for a small farm (local food) or a tailor(custom clothes) or any small service professional counteract the advertising dollars (tv, movies, billboards) of large corporate chains with packaged products?

And what do steroids have to do with any of this? What incentives do you create when you start keeping records? If certain transactions are worth big gains (like home runs), then how far will people go to ‘cheat’ the system in order to get that particular spot?
So if you want to avoid steroids and other abuses, what properties do you want your record keeping system to have?